PCWorld – August 2019

76 PCWorld AUGUST 2019

REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT

Codemasters’ buttery-smooth Ego game

engine. We test two laps on the Australia

course, with clear skies.

Nvidia’s RTX Super GPUs blow well past

the Radeon RX 5700 family here, especially at

the more popular 1440p and 1080p

resolutions. But again, AMD’s price cut

changes the tune, with the $350 Radeon RX

5700 surpassing the $350 RTX 2060 in

performance, and the $400 Radeon RX 5700

XT blowing well past the $400 RTX 2060

Super at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.

GTA V

We’re going to wrap things up with a game

that isn’t really a visual barn-burner, but still

tops the Steam charts day in and day out. We

test Grand Theft Auto V ($30 on Humble at

go.pcworld.com/gta5) with all options

turned to Very High, all Advanced Graphics

options except extended shadows enabled,

and FXAA. GTA V runs on the RAGE engine

and has received substantial updates since its

initial launch.

Third time’s a trend. GTA V has

performed better on GeForce hardware ever

since it launched years and years ago, but

now, the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT draw

even with Nvidia’s pricier RTX Super options.

The vastly more expensive Radeon VII is still

a loser here.

POWER DRAW,

THERMALS, AND

NOISE

We also tested the Radeon RX 5700

and RX 5700 XT using 3DMark’s

highly respected Fire Strike synthetic

benchmark. Fire Strike runs at 1080p,

Fire Strike Extreme runs at 1440p, and

Fire Strike Ultra runs at 4K resolution.

All render the same scene, but with

more intense graphical effects as you

move up the scale, so that Extreme

and Ultra flavors stress GPUs even

more. We record the graphics score

to eliminate variance from the CPU.

The Radeon RX 5700 GPUs

achieve higher scores than the RTX

Super duo, even though Nvidia’s

GTA V

(Frames per second)

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

90.51

84.93

93.57

90.26

99.16

97.51

98.33

55.27

45.3

53.54

48.13

61.63

60.3

63.24

100.83

98.43

104.81

98.67

105.27

105.88

104.75

1080p 1440p 4K

Radeon RX 5700

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 (FE)

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super (FE)

AMVega 64D Radeon

Radeon R X 5700 XT

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super (FE)

AMD Radeon VII